Throughout modern history, popular forces
motivated by radical democratic ideals have sought to combat
structures of hierarchy and domination. Sometimes they succeed in
expanding the realm of freedom and justice before being brought to
heel. Often they are simply crushed.

October 1917 provides an example with renewed relevance for today.
The Bolshevik coup eliminated working-class and other popular
organizations and imposed harsh state rule. The total destruction of
nascent socialist elements has since been interpreted as a victory for
socialism. For the West, the purpose was to defame socialism; for the
Bolsheviks, to extract what gain they could from the moral force of
the hopes they were demolishing. Authentic socialist ideals have been
unable to withstand this two-pronged assault.

The past decade in Central America illustrates the standard
pattern. The proliferation of unions, peasant associations and other
popular organizations threatened to provide the basis for democracy
and social reform. This prospect elicited a violent response, with
slaughter, torture and general misery, leaving societies "affected by
terror and panic," "collective intimidation and generalized fear" and
"internalized acceptance of the terror," in the words of the
Salvadoran church. Early efforts in Nicaragua to direct resources to
the poor majority led Washington to initiate economic and ideological
warfare, and outright terrorism, to punish these transgressions by
reducing life to the zero grade. Such actions are considered a success
insofar as the challenge to U.S. power and privilege is rebuffed and
the targets are properly chosen. Killing priests is not clever but
peasant organizers, union leaders and human rights activists are fair
game.

Remarkably, recent events in Eastern Europe depart from the norm.
As the fragile tyrannies collapse under a popular uprising, Moscow is
not only refraining from intervention but even encouraging these
developments alongside significant internal changes. The contrast to
Central America and other U.S. domains could hardly be more dramatic.

The striking asymmetry is highlighted by the U.S. reaction to
Moscow's moves. There is little thought that the United States might
relax its grip over its own domains, or act to mitigate the horrors
that prevail there. Rather, the question is how best to exploit the
retraction of Soviet power to achieve U.S. designs. The test of
Gorbachev's "new thinking" is his willingness to withdraw support from
those whom the United States seeks to crush. Only if Gorbachev permits
us to have our way will he prove his good faith. As recent events in
Panama reveal, the United States continues to claim the right to
achieve its ends by violence, on pretexts so transparently absurd that
refutation is hardly necessary.

This pattern prevails worldwide. Thus in the Middle East, for
almost twenty years Washington has blocked a broad international
consensus on a diplomatic settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In
the current version, the official "peace process" is restricted to the
Baker-Shamir-Peres plan, with its "basic premise" that there can be no
"additional Palestinian state" between Israel and Jordan and no change
in the status of the territories "other than in accordance with the
basic guidelines of the [Israeli] Government," which rules out any
meaningful Palestinian rights. The New York Times observes that "with
the exception of the United States, not one nation has endorsed the
plan," though Moscow is now trying to become a "team player,"
abandoning its "policy of confrontation" and its "radical
positions"--that is, its advocacy of a two-state settlement that
recognizes the national rights of Israel and the Palestinians. In
short, the world is out of step, and unless the Soviet Union becomes a
"team player" by joining us off the spectrum of world opinion and
adopting our rejectionist stance, it is plainly not serious about
detente.

The U.S. response to the events in Eastern Europe should be seen in
a broader context. Since the 1950s both superpowers have been
declining in their capacity to coerce and control. The Vietnam War, in
particular, harmed the U.S. economy while benefiting its major rivals,
Europe and Japan. As has long been observed, a new global order has
been taking shape, with three major blocs: one dominated by the United
States, another by Japan, and the third a European system dominated by
Germany. Western Europe is reconstructing traditional quasi-colonial
relations with the East, and Japan is likely to follow suit. Such
developments could make the United States a second-class power. It is
not surprising that the prospects arouse deep concern.

In the mid-1940s, U.S. planners were ambivalent about unification
of Europe. In the circumstances of the postwar world, it was feared
that the Russians had the advantage in the political game; this
advantage had to be canceled, with West Germany "walled off" from
Soviet influence, in George Kennan's phrase.

Meanwhile, labor and other popular forces were undermined and the
traditional order largely restored. The British Foreign Office favored
the partition of Germany to bar Soviet influences, viewing "economic
and ideological infiltration" from the East as "something very like
aggression." Eisenhower also regarded "Soviet political aggression" as
the real danger, and saw NATO as a barrier against this threat.

Stalin's 1952 proposal to unify Germany with free elections was
flatly rejected because of his condition that a reunited Germany not
join a U.S.-run military alliance, a sine qua non for any Soviet
leadership. Had this and later initiatives been pursued, there might
have been no Berlin wall and no Soviet invasions of East Berlin,
Budapest and Prague. Currently the United States looks askance at
moves toward European integration that might strengthen its major
rivals on the world scene while undermining the U.S. influence that
results from East-West confrontation and the pact system.

Detente raises further problems here. What John Kennedy called the
"monolithic and ruthless conspiracy" has been regularly invoked to
mobilize support for intervention abroad and state industrial
management at home. Now these policies are jeopardized as the threat
loses its credibility.

The policies have deep institutional roots. The crucial planning
document, N.S.C. 68, written just before the Korean War, warned of "a
decline in economic activity of serious proportions" without a
government stimulus through military spending. One function of the
Pentagon system has been to insure that the public provides the costs
of R&D and a state-guaranteed market for advanced industry while
profits accrue to the private sector, a gift to the corporate manager.
Thus, business has always been troubled by what The Wall Street
Journal calls "the unsettling specter of peace," and it grasps at the
hope that a capital-intensive and high-tech military will still
provide, as Gen. Edward Meyer assured, "a big business out there for
industry."

Despite the inefficiency and costs, such devices will not be easy
to replace. It has long been taken for granted that large-scale
government intervention is essential to maintain private economic
power, but nonmilitary forms, however feasible in narrow economic
terms, have unwelcome side effects. They tend to interfere with
managerial prerogatives. organize new constituencies, redistribute
income and in other ways foster democracy and reform, thus conflicting
with the basic goals of social policy designed by the privileged.
Military Keynesianism has none of those defects.

The "economic miracles" of the First World depart still further
from pure capitalist principles, notably Japan and the "Four Tigers"
on its periphery (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong), with
economies coordinated by the state and industrial-financial
conglomerates. Their successes are hardly a tribute to capitalism or
democracy. Here, the sectors that remain competitive are those that
feed from the public trough: high-tech industry and capital-intensive
agriculture, as well as pharmaceuticals and others. Free enterprise is
a suitable theme for rousing oratory, but only so long as the handout
from Washington is secure. To be sure, capitalist doctrines will do
just fine for the former colonies--and now, it is hoped, Eastern
Europe--to facilitate their own exploitation.

As for democratic forms, at best they are limited under the
constraints imposed by private command of resources and investment
decisions, and in recent years the lack of substantive content has
become a virtual cliche.

The United States sought to construct a global system in which
other industrial powers pursue "regional interests" within the overall
framework of order managed from Washington, as Henry Kissinger
admonished the European allies. Meanwhile the Third World is to
"fulfill its function" as a market and source of raw materials and
cheap labor. Every effort will be made to direct Eastern Europe on the
same course. High-level planning documents frankly identify the major
threat to U.S. interests as "nationalistic regimes" that are
responsive to popular pressures rather than the needs of investors.
These concerns underlie persistent U.S. subversion and intervention on
the pretext of Soviet threats, the correlation between U.S. aid and
human rights violations and the extreme hostility to democracy unless
power remains securely in the hands of business, oligarchy and
military elements that respect U.S. priorities. Gorbachev's
initiatives provide only the occasion for tactical adjustments; policy
and its roots are unchallenged, and virtually excluded from discussion
within the ideological system.

With the decline of U.S. power and the diversification of the
international order, however, traditional goals become more difficult
to achieve. Further problems arise from internal dissidence and the
loss of the Soviet threat as an instrument of population control. It
is natural that the U.S. reaction to Gorbachev's moves and the
European accommodation to them should be halting and uncertain.

Since the latter days of the Indochina war, U.S. elites have
undertaken intensive efforts to increase corporate profits, weaken
unions and the welfare system, temper the "crisis of democracy" by
restoring public apathy, and strengthen state-corporate linkages. They
have also sought to solidify the U.S.-controlled bloc, incorporating
Canada and viable sectors of Latin America while maintaining
traditional domains elsewhere. But the world is increasingly out of
control as well as out of step.

Soviet military expenditures began to level off in the mid-1970s --
contrary to what was claimed to justify the Carter-Reagan military
buildup and attack on social programs--and are declining as Gorbachev
attempts to rescue the stagnant command economy. While Reagan
Administration militancy may have hindered these developments, it did
not stop them, and by the mid-1980s Washington was compelled to reduce
its aggressiveness, hysterical rhetoric and military growth as the
costs of Reaganite economic mismanagement became unacceptable.
Fortuitously, both superpowers, for independent reasons, are on a path
away from confrontation.

With Bolshevism disintegrating, capitalism long abandoned and state
capitalist democracy in decline, there are prospects for the revival
of libertarian socialist and radical democratic ideals that had
languished, including popular control of the workplace and investment
decisions, and, correspondingly, the entrenchment of political
democracy as constraints imposed by private power are reduced. These
and other emerging possibilities are still remote, but are no less
exciting than the dramatic events unfolding in Eastern Europe.